The Religious fallacy that just “bugs” me ~

The only way I can possibly relate this thought to you, I believe, is to take you back to where I first came up against it hard core and was baffled by it.

When I attempted college, I had an Ethics class. Whoo-wee was that class ever fun. I the uber-liberal was going to college in Marshalltown, IA, which is not so much. Our instructor had this thing where each night he would present us with an ethical problem and gives us several choices and state that we must choose from those specific choices. And then explain why. My friends wanted to buy “ring side” tickets. It was, in general, a fun exercise of Me-against-All and we all stumbled out of the classroom like soldiers from a battlefield on any given night. Hee hee. Great Fun!

Here was the scenario given and the response from my answer I got that I instinctively knew something was wrong with, but have only recently figured out what:

Lifeboat: You are the first mate (captain is dead) on a sinking lifeboat. The lifeboat is sinking because there are too many people in it. The option is given to A) Let the lifeboat sink B) Ask the sick and elderly to get off, to lessen the load and allow the others to live.

I straight up answered B. A guy in the class, with several others chiming in for him, shot me a savage look: “Then you’re deciding who lives and who dies! That’s GOD’s business! Are you GOD?!? No. You don’t get to just *decide* who lives and who dies. That’s not your place. It is in God’s hands.’. It was the Playing-God argument. To try to save many, but deciding one must die, you are “playing God”.

But here is what bothers me about this argument: God has already decided. We all die. That’s why we are mortal. God’s decision has already been made.

Let’s consider the points of this religion as face-true for a moment and look at the history of Divine Decisions: Corruption seeps into the human race, and God decides something needs to be done. But instead of wiping the whole slate clean and starting afresh, it picks one family (Noah) who is devout and saves it to rebuild with those values. Again, corruption and twisting of values occurs and God’s done with it. However, the son is here to live and decide among the race and says “NO! Please – let me save them. I will teach them, teach them again what is right. Then I will die for them.” But God’s decision was already made. Sure fine this Jesus bloke spoke up for the race not to be wiped and God granted the action, but God’s decision itself was already made. We all die. It’s just the when that is in debate. The in-between here on Earth is our domain, our Fate. So all these arguments of going-against-God that have been used for such horrendous ethical crimes in this race’s time: witch burnings (most likely just strong headed women), homophobia murderers, crusades and hatred, hatred, hatred – this is all the work of Man, and Man alone. Do not sully God’s hands with your decisions. God has already decided, but is allowing us to play out our Mortal lives on this Earth on the argument that we may be savable in the end. No one wants to scrap an entire race that may have some redeeming qualities – that seems cruel. And God is kind, no?

So it is YOU – all of you out there who continually use GOD as an excuse for your actions or intolerant way of being: it is YOU who have failed to learn, in all this time, the simple lesson of Positives from Negatives. To recognize a positive from a negative. Anyone who tells you to hate, to outcast, to disagree with on principle of Existence another living being – these are fools caught up in Negative energy flow and letting darkness of anger and aggression empower them. It is, and has been for thousands of years now, your job to learn to separate and dislodge, cut out and resist the Negative, and learn to embrace the Positive. Because what we do here in-between is our business. Seems an awful waste of grace if we cannot learn so simple a lesson.

Plus, if you just “ask” the sick and elderly (whom God has already scheduled to die earlier) to get out, which is how you stated the question, then *they* are the ones making the decision. If you throw them out, that’s different, IMO.

Jessie and I watched the Dateline NBC last night about the woman who recently had octuplets even though she’s single and unemployed and has already burned out her support network with her previous 6 kids. We were both struck by how she couldn’t let any of her frozen embryos die because that would be “playing God,” but she had no qualms about bringing them to life after God had made her infertile! It’s some kind of blind spot.